May 31, 2009

Why the settlements are important.Excerpts from two characteristically incisive comments by military and intelligence analyst J. E. Dyer at Jonathan Tobin’s contentions post yesterday:

The most consistent position from Israeli leaders . . . is that the
West Bank is a holistic national defense issue, of which the settlements are an integral element. No aspect of the settlements is divorced from the question of defensible borders for
Israel . . .

Without occupying the summits that look down on
Israel’s eastern border,
Israel can’t defend her narrow territory against attack from the East. That is the defensible borders issue with the
West Bank, and was demonstrated clearly in the ‘67 war. The significance of holding these summits has only increased with time, and the expanded range of man-portable missile systems. . . .

One thing is certain. Everyone in the Middle East understands the military/defensive value of the Israeli settlements in the
West Bank. They fully understand there that the beef the Palestinians have with the settlements is precisely that the settlements deny the Palestinians access to the summits that look down on Jerusalem, and the rest of Israel’s eastern border.

If Israel did, in fact, abandon that territory in terms of occupation and military defense, there is no natural or political barrier at the perimeter of the West Bank that would prevent outside support to the Palestinians there from quickly turning the threat to Israel — within 2-3 weeks — into the same level of threat posed to Israel from Lebanon, and from the other side of the Golan Heights.

There is no reason whatsoever to imagine that
Jordan would (or even could) do anything to prevent the development of such a threat. If
Israel did not address it promptly by reoccupying the
West Bank, it could build very quickly after that into a full-blown military threat.

Why “settlement activity” is a non-issue.Excerpts from Elliott Abrams’ April 7, 2009 article in the Washington Post:

For one thing, most settlement activity is in those major blocs that it is widely understood
Israel will keep. For another, those settlements are becoming more populated, not geographically larger. . . . population growth inside settlements does not [take land that Palestinians own or use, or interfere with Palestinian mobility or agricultural activity]. For the past five years, Israel's government has largely adhered to guidelines that were discussed with the United States but never formally adopted: that there would be no new settlements, no financial incentives for Israelis to move to settlements and no new construction except in already built-up areas.

Why ceasing all Israeli “settlement activity” would unfairly affect final status issues.Excerpt from Vel Nirtist’s May 31 article at American Thinker:

Israelis are not the only ones who build on the disputed land to accommodate for ‘natural growth,' thus "pre-judging" the outcome of diplomacy. Palestinians do, too -- and the Obama administration, to be fair or at least consistent in its concern that "facts on the ground" should not adversely affect final-status negotiations, should put equal pressure on the Palestinians to stop all their building in the West Bank, too -- for when the Palestinians build in the West Bank, they also create "facts on the ground," erecting their structures on the land which Israelis may want to be part of their state. . . .

Because the
West Bankis a disputed territory . . . It is worth repeating yet again that before the West Bank was "occupied" by the Israelis in 1967 when they beat off the Arab aggression, it was under Jordanian occupation that started in 1948, and that prior to that it was occupied by the British who had the mandate to do so from the League of Nations; and that prior to that it was part of the Ottoman Empire. "Palestinian state" never existed, and cannot claim any territory as legitimately its own.

To recap:(1) the major settlements are on the high ground overlooking pre-1967 Israel, and whoever holds that high ground holds the military assets necessary either to defend or attack Israel; (2) Israeli settlement activity for the last five years has been largely limited to growth within the geographical limits of those settlement blocs, which will be kept by Israel in any conceivable peace agreement; and (3) the entire West Bank is disputed territory, as to which Israel has historical and religious connections, legal claims arising out of the documents that established the British mandate, and the military necessity to insure it cannot become the staging area for the kind of attack that nearly destroyed Israel in 1967.

Israel

’s connections, claims and necessities can be negotiated by
Israel in return for a Palestinian and Arab commitment to recognize
Israel within defensible borders -- but to suggest that the current major settlements are “obstacles to peace,” or that stopping settlement activity within them would lead to peace, is to suggest that an
Israel with defensible borders is an obstacle.There will be no peace (even if a “peace agreement” were signed) if
Israel does not have defensible borders, and the freedom to live within them.In fact, a “peace agreement” without such borders or freedom would lead to a new war.

Which is why settlement activity will continue in the same fashion it has for the last five years.

May 27, 2009

Daniel Mendelsohn -- author of the monumental memoir of the family he lost in the Holocaust (“The Lost:A Search for Six of the Six Million”) -- received his B.A. in Classics from the University of Virginia, summa cum laude, and received both his M.A. and Ph.D in Classics from Princeton. On May 15, he gave a Commencement Address at U. C. Berkeley, to those graduating with degrees in Classics, which began as follows:

Exactly thirty years ago today, on a warm day in the middle of May of 1979, at the end of my freshman year at college, I picked up the telephone in my apartment in Charlottesville, Virginia, and called my grandfather in Miami Beach, Florida, to announce that I'd decided to major in Classics.

The news did not go over well.

"Classics what?" said my bemused grandfather, a man whose formal education had ended in 1914, when Austria-Hungary entered World War I; a man who, by the time he was nineteen, as I was on that May day, had lived through a World War, lost a father, crossed an ocean, exchanged Europe for America, one civilization for another; had, from nothing, made a life. "It's books? Music? Classical what?", he repeated.

"No, grandpa," I said, clearing my throat, my fingers, gripping the plastic receiver, starting to sweat. "Classical literature. The Classics … You know, like Greek and Latin." There was only a confused silence on the other end, and so I blurted, rather helplessly, "Plato!"

There was a fumbling noise on the other end of the line, and when the conversation resumed, it was not my grandfather but his wife who spoke — a lady who had been born and raised as what we Jews call a Litvak, a word whose nuances, savoring richly of a world as lost, in its way, as that of Sappho and Sophocles, are inadequately conveyed by the neutral adjective "Lithuanian"; it was, now, my grandfather's wife who spoke vigorously, incredulously, into the phone on hearing that I was going to be majoring in Latin and Greek.

"Greek! Latin!" she spat. "What good it will do you, Greek and Latin? They are dead, the Greeks, the Romans — all dead, for a thousand years they are dead! A thousand years! I have been to Greece, been to Athens! And I can tell you — they are dead! What good did it do them, their literature, their art?! Plato? What good will he do for you? I have been to the grave of Plato, and I can tell you: he has been dead for a thousand years! Trust me, find something else to study, you'll make a living at least, you'll be happier!"

She took a deep breath and wearily ended with a sentence that—as she could not possibly guess, that May afternoon thirty years ago—would give me the title of a book I would write one day, a book about her vanished world, and how it vanished. "Plato, the Greeks," she muttered. "In a thousand years, it will all be lost."

The address is worth reading in its entirety – but don’t read it yet.

First, read this story, told by Matt Mendelsohn (whose photos in “The Lost” are as integral to the book as the text itself), when he visited Sinai Temple in 2007, shortly after the book was published, speaking on how the book came to be.It is an anecdote about the last survivor in a small town in the Ukraine, whom Matt, Danieland their sister Jennifermet on their first trip to Eastern Europe:

Josef Feuer, who has also since passed away, lived in Striy [in the Ukraine].He was called the “Last Jew of Strij” . . . And the only reason he was the Last Jew of Striy was because he was an army pensioner in the Russian Army.And so, although there were no Jews left in Striy, he continued to live there because of the army pension -- that was the only thing he had.

Daniel did a rambling interview in Polish, in Yiddish, in German, Ukrainian -- bits of everything.And I sat there taking pictures, thinking for the most part, “I don’t understand a word of it.”

And after the interview was over, Mr. Feuer got up, in this crappy Soviet apartment building where he lived, with drinking water in the bathtub and rusty spoons to eat with.We were going to leave the apartment building, and I said to Alex, our translator, “Please tell him to keep walking, because I’d like to photograph him as he goes down the set of stairs.”

Now I’ll pause here for a second because, as Daniel points out, there were a lot of moments of serendipity in this project, a lot of moments -- perhaps not serendipity -- but just coming full circle.So I’ll tell you one quick story.I come from Long Island, where every town it seems is named after an Indian name -- Massapeequa, Montauk . . .Everywhere you go in Long Island.And when we were growing up, my oldest brother Andrew used to say this same thing all the time, and we would all sort of snicker, and he would say:“Lots of Indian Names.No Indians.”

And so now we’re in Striy and Joseph Feuer is coming down out of this crappy Soviet apartment building and he stops dead in his tracks and he turns to my sister, and he’s standing here and I’m standing right here, and even though we didn’t understand a single word of his interview, in broken English he stops and turns to me and he says: “Call me ‘Last of the Mohicans’.”

And Jennifer and I -- we started sobbing.And all I could think of was “Lots of Indian names.No Indians.”

Matt Mendelsohn’s anecdote is told from Daniel Mendelsohn’s perspective on pages 141-142 of “The Lost” and it adds an important element that takes the story even further:

[Josef Feuer] had, he said, written quite recently to the German government about getting them to erect a memorial at the site of the great Aktion in the Holobutow forest outside of the city, where in 1941 a thousand Jews were taken and shot; the site, he said, was overgrown and wild, and bones could be seen thrusting up from the ground.

As he told us this story, Feuer held up a copy of the letter he’d written, in German, to Berlin.Then he picked up another, bearing an official-looking governmental seal.The Germans, he said, had responded with great alacrity, and had proposed the following:that if Mr. Feuer and the other members of Striy’s Jewish community could raise a certain amount of money toward the landscaping of the site at the Holobutow forest and the construction of the memorial on it, the German government would be more than pleased to match the amount.

At this point Feuer brandished a third paper:his response to the Germans’ proposal.It’s difficult, now, to remember the gist of it, since the opening of his letter was so distracting.It said, “Dear Sir, All the other members of the Stryjer Jewish community are IN the Holobutow forest.”

This fact, the accuracy of which we had no reason to doubt, was surely what led this scholarly and gentle man to turn to us, as he was leading us down the gray steps of his building when our interview had ended, and say to Matt, who at that moment snapped his picture, Tell them that I am the Last of the Mohicans.

It is memory, and the study of the past, that preserves a civilization.Lose that, and it is lost.Keep it, and it keeps you.It is true of both a people and a country.And it is a story of individuals, and what they did, and sought to pass on, and why -- every one of them, including those whose names we do not know.

May 25, 2009

The picture is of the Los Angeles National Cemetery, taken on May 23, 2009.The cemetery was established in 1889, at a time when the population of the City of
Los Angeles was about 25,000 and the western portion virtually vacant.Today it is located in the heart of Westwood, with the San Diego Freeway on one side and the
Getty
Museum visible above it on the left.The gravestones extend as far as the eye can see -- more than 85,000 on 114 acres -- reflecting the fallen from the seven wars that followed.

On six stone tablets at the entrance of the cemetery are six stanzas taken from “Bivouac of the Dead,” by Theodore O'Hara (1820–1867), ending with this:

May 22, 2009

Rabbi Gerald Wolpe died this week at age 81.In the Jewish Daily Forward, Stephen Fried, adjunct professor at
Columbia
University’s Graduate School of Journalism, and the author of “The New Rabbi,” has this appreciation:

American Jews lost one of our greatest sermonizers, one of our most fascinating and challenging pulpit leaders, and a renaissance rabbi whose dramatic life yielded several distinct acts, each with its own powerful teaching moments.

In my hometown of
Harrisburg
,
Pa., they still talk about the inspirational speech he gave during the Six Day War from the back of a flatbed truck in the Jewish community center’s parking lot . . . .But his career was really made at
Har
Zion
Temple in
Philadelphia, once the mothership of the Conservative movement in
America, which he led through its controversial process of reinvention in the early 1970s. With the power of his voice, and his canny sense of what he called “the retail business of religion,” he showed once urban Har Zion . . . how to create a new synagogue and a new sensibility in the suburbs. . . .

But then . . . Wolpe’s formidable wife, Elaine, the first woman ever called to the bimah at Har Zion, suffered a stroke that nearly killed her. And in nursing her back to health, Wolpe became a different rabbi, his voice suddenly devoted to exploring more personal themes of caregiving, community and faith in the face of family adversity. The personal saga of “Rabbi and Elaine,” as they were called, became an ongoing sermon that touched not only Jews in
Philadelphia, but people of all faiths around the world . . . .

And his sermons were also informed by the intellectual and emotional exploits of his four sons, who grew up to be, in chronological order, a medical researcher, a bioethicist and two rabbis. . . .

I just got back from Wolpe’s funeral at Har Zion, where all four of his sons spoke eloquently about their father and his many intellectual, emotional and spiritual gifts. There was a lot of humor. (His eldest son recalled asking as a child what his dad’s sermon topic would be. “Judaism,” he was told. But what about Judaism, he asked. “I’m for it,” the young rabbi answered, with a cherubic grin.) There were a lot of tears — a lot of tears. . . .

We can only record a small but memorable instance of his gracious humor, on the occasion of his first visit to
Sinai
Temple in
Los Angeles, after his son David became its senior rabbi and began to draw a thousand people to services each Shabbat morning with his own remarkable sermons.Gerald Wolpe confided to the Sinai congregation that he had been nervous about agreeing to speak at his son’s shul -- afraid he might not measure up -- but that he had overcome his fears when he said to himself:“What’s the worst they can say?His son is better?”

Bryan Schwartzman’s article in The Jewish Exponent is here; the Jewish Journal obituary is here; the JTA obituary is here – all of them worth reading in their entirety.Donations may be made to
Har
Zion
Temple,
1500 Hagys Ford Rd.,
Penn Valley,
Pa.
19072, and to
Sinai
Temple,
10400 Wilshire Blvd.,
Los Angeles,
CA
90024.His memory is a blessing.

May 18, 2009

The guest of honor was Avram Hershko, Israel’s Nobel Laureate for Chemistry in 2004, a Holocaust survivor who received the Nobel Prize for the groundbreaking discovery that led to the development of Velcade, now being used to treat multiple myeloma, a cancer of the bone marrow.His remarkable story is here.You can do your own part here.

May 14, 2009

May 11, 2009

In the current issue of The New York Review of Books, Gershom Gorenberg has a lengthy essay about the 1948 War: “The War to Begin All Wars.” It is a nuanced discussion of both history and historians. Not all of its conclusions seem right, but it is worth reading in its entirety.

May 06, 2009

Dyer is a retired Naval intelligence officer currently researching a book on strategy in the Cold War. Her blog -- The Optimistic Conservative -- is an extraordinary source of strategic thinking and comment.